Driving Knowledge Discovery and Enhancing Context with Atlan
The Lively Metadata Pioneers collection options Atlan clients who’ve not too long ago accomplished an intensive analysis of the Lively Metadata Administration market. Paying ahead what you’ve discovered to the following information chief is the true spirit of the Atlan group! In order that they’re right here to share their hard-earned perspective on an evolving market, what makes up their trendy information stack, revolutionary use instances for metadata, and extra.
On this installment of the collection, we meet Ted Andersson, Director of Enterprise Intelligence at CouponFollow, who shares how CouponFollow’s vital enterprise development has pushed comparable development of their information, how he and his crew evaluated the Lively Metadata Administration market, and the way Atlan can function the “glue” between their information practitioners and customers.
This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.
May you inform us a bit about your self, your background, and what drew you to Knowledge & Analytics?
I’ve an educational background in arithmetic and statistics, graduating with a Grasp’s in Statistics. I’ve been concerned with information for so long as I can bear in mind, so it was a pure factor for me to go from working within the statistics realm to working within the information realm.
My profession in information began at a small influencer advertising and marketing firm, the place I used to be first launched to internet affiliate marketing and the tech world. From there, my journey has taken me by varied industries and roles. I’ve labored on tasks starting from name quantity projections and optimum staffing ranges at a tax and accounting agency, to growing a chatbot for buyer assist questions. I additionally had a stint at an EMS providers firm, serving to them transition their software program from on-premise to the cloud.
I returned to Affiliate by becoming a member of Rakuten Rewards, and right here I’m at CouponFollow, the place I’m the Director of Enterprise Intelligence, accountable for something Knowledge. Wherever there’s any information that’s created, modified, reworked, or visualized at CouponFollow, my crew is accountable for it. That crew encompasses Knowledge Engineering, conventional evaluation, and even the early phases of pushing into Machine Studying and Knowledge Science tasks.
Would you thoughts describing CouponFollow?
CouponFollow has historically been a coupon and deal website. Our founder is an knowledgeable in search engine marketing and he’d been rising CouponFollow.com for greater than 10 years, however with the pandemic there was an enormous surge in curiosity in coupons and on-line procuring.
As the corporate continued to mature, CouponFollow began to usher in a a lot bigger crew, together with me, who was introduced in to start out the information crew. On the time, they have been working with a consultancy that had gotten all of the “plumbing” in place, however they wanted somebody to assist set the imaginative and prescient and technique for information at CouponFollow.
An important a part of our enterprise is natural search. When somebody goes to Google and kinds in one thing like “Macy’s Coupon,” we need to be as excessive as doable in that rating. We use Affiliate to monetize the clicking and that’s an important a part of our enterprise.
That being mentioned, we’re at a spot now the place we’re beginning to diversify, shifting into the whitelabeling house with an providing for CouponFollow to construct branded procuring experiences for choose companions. Prospects for this providing is perhaps information or content material websites, the place you see coupons and procuring as a part of their providing.
We have now just a few totally different methods, making an attempt to scale a enterprise away from simply being targeted completely on natural search, towards extra alternatives.
What does your information stack appear to be?
We have now Snowflake, dbt, and we use Sigma for visualization. CouponFollow was acquired a few yr in the past by a bigger firm known as System1, and so they’re a Tableau store, so we use slightly Tableau to accommodate their wants, and use Sigma for our personal reporting. Past that, we use Snowplow for real-time occasions, and a instrument known as Indicative for visualizing how our visitors is doing in actual time.
Why seek for an Lively Metadata Administration resolution? What was lacking?
This began off after I requested my crew to doc dashboards and information fashions, and they might create one thing in Confluence. Primary, no person checked out it, and quantity two, by the point it was written, it appeared prefer it was already out-of-date. So the method was simply not scalable. We’d construct a dashboard, then doc it, however as quickly as somebody modified that dashboard, the documentation could be out-of-date. When someone would go to get a solution, the documentation was not giving them what they wanted.
Moreover, definitions themselves could be everywhere. One individual may consider Click on-through Fee (CTR) to imply one factor, and a distinct crew thinks of it as one thing else, and so they every have their very own dashboards which have CTR, however they aren’t aligned.
When these groups aren’t aligned, they ask “What’s the BI Group doing?” or “Why are they saying that” and you find yourself with numerous questions and confusion. CouponFollow ingests an amazing quantity of knowledge from all types of various locations, and it’s very difficult to maintain monitor of all of it.
Due to all of this, a instrument like Atlan actually grew to become top-of-mind.
Why was Atlan a superb match? Did something stand out throughout your analysis course of?
We started after I talked to someone who was working with Atlan and advisable it. Due to that, Atlan was the place to begin in our search, however we at all times love to do our due diligence.
So I did some procuring round to take a look at the opposite choices, like Alation, Castor, and Collibra, and had conversations with all these firms. A few of them definitely look like they’ve good instruments, however they is perhaps targeted simply on very massive organizations. That’s not us, and that’s not what we have been on the lookout for. So, it got here right down to Atlan and Castor.
Castor supplied a reduced fee beneath what Atlan was charging. However I feel what pushed me and my crew over the sting for Atlan was it simply looks as if Atlan is the extra complete, state-of-the-art instrument, and that Castor is taking part in catch-up. They simply look like they’re slightly bit behind Atlan.
And I favored the gross sales method of Atlan. Typically talking, I didn’t discover the crew to be pushy or “salesy”. It was extra like “That is our instrument. We all know what we’re about, we stand behind what we’ve got, and we need to work with you as a accomplice.”
Generally we’ll get these bizarre gross sales pitches speaking about options which are coming within the pipeline, possibly in six months, possibly by no means, saying, “Effectively when you go along with us we’ll be good in two years.” Or there’s throwing shade on the competitors.
The Atlan pitch wasn’t about that. I discovered Atlan to be very direct, easy, and that you’re what you might be and also you’re assured in your product. I like working with firms like that.
What do you propose on creating with Atlan? Do you may have an concept of what use instances you’ll construct, and the worth you’ll drive?
My crew is within the planning phases of a reasonably large reorganization. The position of knowledge at CouponFollow has grown tremendously from what was initially known as the Enterprise Intelligence crew, however we’re actually a Knowledge Engineering crew.
We began with pulling information into the warehouse, and constructing some restricted visualization and reporting. Now we’re in a spot the place we’ve gotten traction, and there’s a number of totally different instructions to go in, a number of information, and a number of scale. So the primary precedence is getting this reorganization performed so we are able to account for all these new, totally different processes we’re following with our information.
I need Atlan to be the glue that pulls all of this collectively, and supply a single, shared place the place all people can go to know the information, the way it flows, and the place it comes from. Our first three months contain rolling Atlan out to my very own crew, and never an excessive amount of finish person or enterprise stakeholder involvement but. We’ll use it day after day, perceive what’s in Atlan, after which we’ll do restricted rollouts to particular stakeholders who’re a bit extra data-savvy to get them engaged.
Down the highway, I’d prefer to see our enterprise customers empowered to make use of Atlan as a form of “social place” the place they’ll are available and make a remark if one thing seems to be bizarre. If they’ve questions like “What’s the supply?” or “Who’s the proprietor?” they’ll do their very own exploration, and so they’ll know the place information is coming from, and which individual to speak to.
Proper now, if we don’t give enterprise customers a hyperlink to the dashboard they’re on the lookout for, it’s very exhausting for them to search out one thing on their very own. Atlan will likely be an incredible place for them to seek for one thing like the preferred dashboards to allow them to perceive how they may use them. That’s the type of conduct I’d prefer to see extra of.
Did we miss something?
For the needs of anybody studying that’s looking for the correct instrument, I might say the differentiating issue with Atlan is its place out there. It’s this “candy spot” the place I feel Atlan can work with any firm, whether or not it’s an organization that’s our measurement or an early stage startup, so long as they’ve considerably of an information stack. And I can see it rising to assist somebody like Procter & Gamble, as effectively.
I feel Atlan can develop with our firm because it grows, too. The product is effectively built-out, and any options I wish to have seen in my wishlist have been already there. There wasn’t something missing the place we felt we must purchase early, then sit and await options to return on-line.
So I feel there’s a singular worth proposition that the competitors can’t fairly match. Even with their reductions, it was form of a no brainer to go along with Atlan.
Photograph by Julio Lopez on Unsplash